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New York Times Closes Climate Desk

The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. No decision has been made about the fate of the Green Blog, which is edited from the environment desk.

“It wasn’t a decision we made lightly,” said Dean Baquet, the paper’s managing editor for news operations. “To both me and Jill [Abramson, executive editor], coverage of the environment is what separates the New York Times from other papers. We devote a lot of resources to it, now more than ever. We have not lost any desire for environmental coverage. This is purely a structural matter.”

On Dec. 3 the Times announced that it was offering buyouts to 30 newsroom managers in an effort to reduce newsroom expenses. But Baquet said the decision to dismantle the environment desk wasn’t linked to budgetary concerns and that no one is expected to lose his or her job.

Instead, Baquet said the change was prompted by the shifting interdisciplinary landscape of news reporting. When the desk was created in early 2009, the environmental beat was largely seen as “singular and isolated,” he said. It was pre-fracking and pre-economic collapse. But today, environmental stories are “partly business, economic, national or local, among other subjects,” Baquet said. “They are more complex. We need to have people working on the different desks that can cover different parts of the story.”

The environmental reporters were told of the decision on Wednesday. Baquet said he will meet with each of them to discuss their next assignments and the future of their beats. No decision has been made about the fate of the Green Blog, the online site for the Times’ daily coverage of energy and environment news.

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Coverup. Close off the debate–NOW. Deniers are only politically motivated anyway. We are not going to give the non-believers any respect, from our “partly business, economic, national or local, among other subjects” propaganda reporters.

That is what is really in their minds. They have good jobs, they ARE GOING to protect them, and that’s all there is to it. You want truth, go to Wal-Mart (Ha-Ha).

And it is all because ALL THE “EXPERT” SCIENTISTS are incompetent (when they promulgate obviously false theory) or liars (when they refuse to admit they don’t know).

Interpretation: Cloak the advocacy and make it more resistant to concentrated attack by diffuse interweaving into multiple branches of more safely harbored influence. …Or in other words: Become one with the whole (or should it be hole?)

James Delingpole blogged about the news story just now on the Daily Telegraph blog.

I see that somebody logged in to the Daily Telegraph comments section using the sign-in name of this website: Tallbloke. Reading the insulting comments I suspect it is not you but a shrill posing as you.

Tallbloke. I’m confused. You seem to be an AGW sceptic, but your comments on James Delingpole’s post on the NYT subject seem to be pro-AGW. Are you having a laugh or is someone taking your name in vain or am I missing something? Sincerely, DaveF

It’s Death of Little Nell time again in the field of climate “science.” The New York Times – aka Pravda – has announced the closure of its Environment Desk. Rumours that the entire environment team, headed by Andy Revkin, have volunteered to be recycled into compost and spread on the lawn of the new billion dollar home Al Gore bought with the proceeds of his sale of Current TV to Middle Eastern oil interests are as yet unconfirmed. What we do know is that it’s very, very sad and that all over the Arctic baby polar bears are weeping bitter tears of regret.

A spokesman for the New York Times, quoted in the Guardian, has reaffirmed the paper’s commitment to environmental issues.

“We devote a lot of resources to it, now more than ever. We have not lost any desire for environmental coverage. This is purely a structural matter.”

Absolutely. It’s what newspapers always do when they’re committed to a particular field: close down the entire department responsible for covering it.

But it’s still not going to stop some mean-minded cynics sniping and casting aspersions, I’ll bet. Why, some of them will be pointing out the eerie coincidence with the Met Office recent tacit admission that “global warming” isn’t anywhere near what that their dodgy models predicted it would be. And also with NASA’s recent admission that solar variation has a much more significant on terrestrial climate than it has hitherto been prepared to acknowledge. If you didn’t know better, you’d almost get the impression that AGW theory has been so crushingly falsified that hard-headed newspaper executives, even ones at papers as painfully right-on as the New York Times, just aren’t prepared to fund its promulgation any more.

What this means for similarly overstaffed environment desks at other left-wing newspapers one can scarcely begin to imagine. Might it be that we never again read a piece by Leo Hickman entitled “How Do You Tell Your Five Year Old Son That His World Is About To Explode In A Blazing Fireball Because Of Man’s Selfishness And Greed And Refusal To Change His Lifestyle?”

What, and no more Caroline Lucas essays, either on jaunty topics like “My plan for Britain: rationing; cold baths; the banning of cars; and hairshirts for everyone – to be enforced by my new green Mutaween of Environmental Commissars”?

And how would we cope if we never get to read any more Damian Carrington articles on “Official: wind farms are brilliant for bats and rare birds, boosting their numbers by gazillions every year – says new research by RenewablesUK,” and “Global warming: why the latest evidence that it’s going down is sure-fire proof that it’s going up, says Met Office” and “How fracking poisons the water supply, steals food from the poor, encourages racism and causes baby kittens in wicker baskets to die in agony mewling for their mothers”.

Now that was a good one tallbloke or who ever you are impersonating him! :lol:

I still don’t trust NYT’s words. Maybe NYT just moved everyone out of that department to quietly re-decorate… hot red we’re-all-gonna-burn out… new icy blue we’re-all-gonna-freeze wall graphics in. After all, they are seven years behind the schedule anyway, you know, the old thirty-year switcheroo. ☺

For the redecoration of the carbon war room at NYT, I am visualizing something more interactive – like a scale theme, featuring scales which tip catastrophically every time you walk by, send an email, or answer your cell phone!

(This will help to keep the focus of the writers on the cataclysmic “tipping points” in the “fragile” planet’s systems due to free humanity’s uses of fire, water, cattle, crops, oil, and electricity, in the new Anthropocene Age.)

Phew! Talk about hairy. Pray and hit the button on a live blog with lots of active traffic.

For those who cannot see what is now vanished, this is what I think happened.

Rog (Tallbloke) logged in first thing in the morning, did some minor moderator stuff and then thought he wrote a new article and published it, then went to read comments from late yesterday.

I am now guessing, for unknown reasons an offline client tangled a remote autobackup with a new article and replaced an existing article with a new one instead of creating and uploading a new one.

Guess we will never know.

I’ve roughly cloned the new article and publish. Will have lost format and image.

Took a good look and guessed the right restore point for this article. (WordPress uses Commit on the database, is inviolate on a trail). Restore. (fearful things appeared to happen at this point, pulse rate rises, rapid refresh the home page and scroll…)

Lot us know it anything looks wrong.

I am still bleary eye’d, not a good time for this. Going to make a large strong coffee.